Breathless Sobs, Displacement, and Parisian Cartography in Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener Rue Labat

There is now a significant body of psychoanalytical and philosophical studies of Sarah Kofman’s autobiographical text Rue Ordener Rue Labat, published in 1994 just six months before the author’s suicide. Many would see Kofman’s suicide as a direct consequence of her “public act of mourning” (Lars Iyers), showing the “dangers of testimony” (Rachel Rosenblum) and Kofman’s inability in the end to use art as a “transport-station of trauma” (Bracha Ettinger). Yet critics such as Rachel Rosenblum and Sara R. Horowitz have convincingly shown that Kofman never in fact stopped speaking of her experience of the loss of her father in Auschwitz and her tormented tortuous relationship during the Occupation of France towards her two mothers, even if some critics find Kofman’s positions on survival philosophically untenable (Eilene Hoft-Mensch). While Rosenblum, however, speaks of a “cartography of writing” in Kofman, she tends to reduce this trope to a question of style. Rare are the readers such as Verena Andermatt Conley of Kofman’s compellingly painful text who raise the question of the role geography and space play in Kofman’s “working through” of her trauma. This essay explores in more depth the question of Parisian cartography and its intimate relation to the expression of Kofman’s breathless sobs in order to show the displaced issues at work in her text.